At the National Governors Association last year, Musk gave some more interesting insights into Tesla’s security effort and especially related to once their vehicles become fully autonomous:

“I think one of the biggest concern for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack.”

He followed with an interesting example of what someone could do with that kind of access:

“In principles, if someone was able to say hack all the autonomous Teslas, they could say – I mean just as a prank – they could say ‘send them all to Rhode Island’ [laugh] – across the United States… and that would be the end of Tesla and there would be a lot of angry people in Rhode Island.”

The CEO said that Tesla developed “specialized encryption” for “multiple sub-systems” in the vehicle and they are developing something for drivers to always have “override authority” if your autonomous vehicle starts doing something “wacky.”

Following the Defcon hacking conference, Musk now says that Tesla plans to open-source its security software for free to other automakers:

Great Q&A @defcon last night. Thanks for helping make Tesla & SpaceX more secure! Planning to open-source Tesla vehicle security software for free use by other car makers. Extremely important to a safe self-driving future for all.

Tesla has a good relationship with whitehat hackers and security researchers who have periodically reported some vulnerabilities, which Tesla has been able to quickly fixed through over-the-air software updates.

The hackers reported the vulnerability to Tesla before going public and the automaker pushed an update fairly quickly.

Once gaining access, the hackers were able to upload their own software to take control of the vehicle, but Tesla pushed a fix with code signing to add a cryptographic key to change onboard software. Tesla CTO JB Straubel said at the time:

“Cryptographic validation of firmware updates is something we’ve wanted to do for a while to make things even more robust. This is what the world needs to move towards. Otherwise the door is thrown wide open anytime anyone finds a new vulnerability.”

That’s becoming increasingly true as vehicles become more connected and more systems rely on computers.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla has been known to open-source its technology to accelerate the advent of electric transport by opening all its patents back in 2013.